I like to budget for expenses that are more flexible in terms of when you spend them, like money for dates, decorating, clothing, personal spending, etc. using "funds." Basically all this means is each month you add a specified amount to your specific fund. The unused portion rolls over to the next month.

Why do I love budget funds?I love using funds in budgets for a lot of reasons.

Funds are extremely powerful tools to cap runaway spending. The types of things they are best at tracking (clothing, random fun personal purchases, home goods, etc.) are just the types of things that tend to be impulse buys.

They make your budget more flexibility-- and that's something that really makes living with a budget more enjoyable and successful. It helps not feel so pinched if you know you can still buy the things you enjoy, you just have to save up for them.

They can help your marriage. Even if you and your spouse are both frugal, you're not the same person, so you're not going to value everything the same. Having a personal fund enables one spouse to buy things they enjoy without guilt (or resentment from the other spouse). Lisa gives some other good marriage money tips in this post.

How do you track funds? There are a couple of ways to track funds-- in Excel, on paper, online, or using the envelope system.

Excel. I have a separate tab in our family budget file where I track our funds. There's a column for each different fund. You can download our free template on our Facebook page here. Or you can make your own that suits your needs. The monthly budget shows the full amount of your fund flowing out every month. But you track the balance on a separate tab. Here's what ours looks like.

Paper. I know historically I haven't been super supportive of using paper for budgets, but here's one area where it can work pretty well. When we were first married, we tracked most of our budget in Excel, but we had a sheet of paper taped to the fridge where we tracked our fun spending money. On the first of the month, we would add $15 to our account (we've since increased it a bit). Any time we spent money for fun discretionary items, we would write the expense on the paper and update the running balance. It was kind of fun to have it up in an easy to see place (although we would usually move it if we had people over...)

Online. Honestly, I haven't tried to do fund accounting using software because I found it a bit frustrating. But, similar to budgeting for irregular expenses, I think you could use the rollover function to make this work on Mint (or whatever you're using).

Envelope system. This system uses cash. You deposit your monthly allotment in an envelope, jar, or other container each month and spend out of it throughout the month. The leftover stays in the envelope at the end of the month and "rollsover" to the next. Pros: You will never overspend. Cons: You have to go get the cash each month, and it doesn't work as well for online purchases.

To Do #6: Set up your funds

Decide what types of funds you want to have (date, individual spending, etc.)

Decide what amount to allocate to each fund monthly.

Set up your system (Excel, paper, online, or envelope).

And here are the products I'm loving: Mr. Clean Magic Erasers (gets crayon off walls, need I say more?) and these leather earrings. My baby always rubs her face up against my cheek, but these are nice and soft and don't scratch her.

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